FIRST DRAFT

Bitches Don't Know How Hard Conservative Guys Work to Get Tail, Okay?

Via the Crack Den, we have this mess, the most outrageously stupid and noxious parts of which have already been covered, but here's this bit I'd like to talk about: 

Moreover, do you know what a man thinks when he hears a woman make jokes like this?

How many men does it take to screw in a light bulb? ONE. … He just holds it up there and waits for the world to revolve around him.

“Run!!!!”

Because I actually agree with that. If you're with a woman and she tells that joke, flee. Hit the road. Get the fuck out. BECAUSE SHE'S NOT FUNNY, and life is too short and stupid to spend with somebody whose entire comedy repertoire was passed on by Leno's writers as oldsauce.

Bitter, man-hating women aren’t any more attractive to the opposite sex than angry misogynistic men are to women.

You know what? If there actually were as many man-hating women as men claim there are, the species would have died out long ago. 

I know women who treat their partners like shit. I know women who talk down to the men in their lives and then sloganeer about girl power and such. Guess what? They're just assholes and the degree of their assholitude has exactly jack shit to do with their feminism. There is no code of the sisterhood that prevents me from noticing when somebody female is being a total jerk. There is nothing about being a feminist that automatically makes you a contemptuous, disrespectful bag of fuck, and I have zero issue telling somebody, "Look, be nicer. Gloria Steinem never said to be a completely horrible creep to everyone." 

The man you’re talking to probably doesn’t know what color your eyes or fingernails are, whether your belt matches your shoes, or that some other woman in the room is wearing the same outfit as you. Also, although men do think about relationships and the women they’re dating, they don’t spend as much time doing it as women. So, they’re probably not wondering if the slight pause after your ex-boyfriend’s name means you still like him or whether their general disinterest in your story about the lady in accounting who doesn’t like your purse will give you the wrong signals about the relationship.

They're probably wondering why they're dating someone who cares about that shit, for serious. Men of the world, why are you dating people who sprang fully formed from the head of a dude pitching scripts to Kate Hudson? 

Wait.

I think I just figured this out.

Look, I read at least six pieces like this a week because I try to read the whole Internet each day, and what it all boils down to is that relationship advice goes something like this: Try as much as you can not to be dicks to each other. But in order to make that shit "edgy" there has to be this whole thing in there about how chicks should stop expecting their men to be grown-ups because that's just too much for you idiots to handle. 

And you knew the comments were gonna be win in a win bucket with a side of win, but here's my favorite, after a thread of complaints about women "putting themselves down:" 

JMD you’ve hit on my number one pet peeve about women (and some men, like my ex!
I can’t figure out they’re being self-critical or fishing for compliments but constantly putting themselves down is maddening. I have always made it a point to only say positive or ‘true’ things about myself, especially around my kids. Kids of friends who self-criticize grow up to do the same thing.

He only says positive things about himself around his children? Dinner conversation must be SCINTILLATING.

A. 

Weekend Question Thread

If you could suddenly step into the life of a movie character, which one would you choose? 

Me, I don't know whether I want to BE Becky Fuller, or just run away with her: 

Despite the trailer, it's actually a romantic comedy about a woman's relationship with her JOB and her professional relationships. And instead of being shamed for being good at it, or loving it, she's just shown working at it and figuring it out like any other normal person. WORSHIP. I seriously watch this thing like once a week now when I can't sleep.

A. 

Professor XXX

I spent 12 years in Catholic school and my entire life as the son of a teacher. Perhaps that’s why I never had the “Teacher wants to see me after school” porn fantasies that appear to populate the dreams of many other men.

As a professor who values the fact I get to work about half a year and earn more than my father did in his last year of work after 38 years in a factory, I never had the “Maybe you’d like to get me to rethink that F” fantasy either.

Still, if you’ve got “Hot for Teacher” on a constant loop in your head and you immediately search for “Teacher sex” on all those free porn sites, perhaps you should relocate to the Oxnard School District in California. Allegations levied against 31-year-old Stacie Halas, a science teacher at Richard B Haydock Intermediate School have led to her being placed on administrative leave while the district sorts things out.

According to several published reports, Halas had worked in pornography under the name Tiffany Six. Aside from several “masturbation style” videos, she performed in hardcore porn films, including one titled “Big Sausage Pizza.” While the district has yet to confirm all of this, the person responsible for filming many of her performances has outed her, shortly before he put her videos online behind a pay wall.

We are nothing if not an opportunistic culture…

As you might expect, this has created some serious handwringing among the good people in the district and has led to people wondering what this world is coming to. Their “mmm… mmm… mmph” approach and the media frenzy surrounding the allegations do little more than allow individuals to engage in moral superiority and faux outrage while quietly searching for her on Google.

Here are the main problems I have with how this has all shaken out:

- Stop saying the teacher was “moonlighting” as a porn star. It’s disingenuous at best and a flat out lie at worst. According to the guy responsible for filming her (if it’s even really her, which we haven’t fully established yet), most of this stuff was shot between 2005 and 2006 when Halas was working as an EMT. Moonlighting suggests that a) she was a teacher while she was also a porn star and b) this porn career is ongoing. Neither of which is true. Calling this activity “moonlighting” is like saying I am a professor who is moonlighting as a gas station attendant because I happened to work as one once.

- This great “moral turpitude” clause that everyone is yammering about needs to be applied universally to the “colleagues” who just “happened” to find her videos on the Web and then alerted administrators. We also need to apply it to the parents who found the videos and the parents of the kids who were able to locate the videos. In this strange little world we’ve created, finding porn online, viewing porn online and doing God knows what else to porn online doesn’t violate moral turpitude, but performing in porn does. Really? Also, have you looked around out there at all the porn? I mean, you could spend an entire week on a single free porn site and not watch half of the shit that’s up there. How is it, exactly, that these “colleagues” just “happened upon” the right site with her video? Hmm…

- We clearly need to invest in improved education and technology in our schools. No, not for the kids, but for the administrators. After being alerted by students (seventh and eighth graders, mind you) that they found the porn film with Halas, administrators did their own searches and were unable to find one scrap of evidence that this film or this actress existed. They were so convinced in their searches that they sent out official notice that the Halas-is-Six rumor was unfounded. Shortly after, several faculty members pulled the video up on their smartphones and showed the administrators, who were shocked. The reason the admin couldn’t find the video? The school district computers had blockers on them, thus restricting their access to porn sites. And these are the people in charge?

- Speaking of stupid things administrators are saying, here’s an amazingly naïve passage from the official post- “OK, we figured out how to find porn on our computers” letter:

“We are asking teachers to discourage the children from searching for and/or visiting these inappropriate sites. We ask that you be particularly vigilant over the next few days with respect to the Internet content being accessed by your child on his or her telephone or other Internet-ready devices.”

The three people in the district who haven’t found the movies yet will likely respect this request for all of about 2.3 seconds before Googling “Tracy Six” and “Big Sausage Pizza.” The quickest way to get people to do something is to tell them not to do it.

 

Quick: Don’t think of a pink elephant.

 

(Disclosure tangent: It dawned on me about half way through this that I was about to start defending someone I’d never met and actions I’d never seen. Thus, I scanned the Web for some deeper insight (stop laughing). I’m doing this for you at First Draft. It’s a dirty job but I’m committed to being an informed blogger… Anyway, I didn’t have access to the whole Tiffany Six back catalog, but what I saw in a couple small clips was enough to give me pause. Let’s be clear about one thing: This wasn’t “nude art pictures.” It wasn’t a “masturbation” thing, either. This was a movie in which the phrase “I want that big black cock in my fucking ass” was being bandied about at the frequency in which you’d hear “More coffee, please” at a diner. I’m not going to pretend for a minute that it would be easy to sit through a parent-teacher conference with her after what I saw. However, I’ve had awkward situations in which a student told me she was pregnant before breaking down in tears in my office, I’ve tried to have a casual conversation with a nun and I’ve had my parents once tell a date of mine that although I’m an only child “it wasn’t due to lack of trying.” If discomfort was my only measuring stick for what should and shouldn’t be allowed, I’d have gone insane years ago.)

Like it or not, pornography is not criminal. It’s not illegal for adults to buy it, own it or even perform in it. I don’t want to see Paris Hilton blowing some guy in what appears to be a room lit by night-vision goggles. I don’t know which Kardashian is in which fuck film, but I know I couldn’t care less about seeing them. However, I can if I want to and that’s what makes this country great: My decisions about what I do, see or enjoy don’t have to be the same things you do, see or enjoy.

I’ve viewed porn and I know plenty of other people who have as well. It’s hypocritical to suggest that consuming it is somehow OK, but being part of it isn’t OK. One of the main reasons I’ve never frequented a strip club (other than I hear the lunch buffets are subpar) is that I heard over the years from a number of former female students that instructors and students alike had frequented these places and often danced at them. The “I’m stripping to pay my way through college” myth? Yeah, it’s less mythological than one might think.

Even more, it’s stupid to think that only degenerates or the depraved ever flip to that X-rated channel or stop by that “book store” that has paper on all its windows. According to Forbes magazine’s most conservative estimate in 2001, porn generates several billion dollars a year. That’s a lot of money for something that no one ever buys or looks at.

What Halas might have done (again, probably it’s her, but let’s stick with the whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing), might offend some people, but it’s not illegal. How many teachers have a DUI, unpaid child support or outstanding speeding tickets? How many of them have engaged in a wild night, had promiscuous sex or done something else that would be “morally questionable” in the eyes of group of parents? We don’t know. The only reason we know about Halas is because her lapse in judgment (or however you want to view this) showed up online. Had she done this 10 or 20 years ago, the only way she’d gotten caught is if someone happened upon her film at a porn store.

If anything, I’d be interested to hear what Halas has to say about this. If you’re looking for a “teachable moment” (stop snickering), maybe she’s got it. If she is ashamed of her past, she could tell kids, “Look, here’s what happens when you do something you should think twice about. There are consequences and they will follow you. Think about that when you’re on Facebook.”

If she’s not ashamed, she could say, “Look, does this make me a worse teacher? I’m teaching science and no, I’m not hot for your kid or your husband. And no, I don’t really like big black cock up my ass, but it paid the rent.”

Either way, pretending that this is a first, a last or an only type of situation is naïve and stupid.

Friday Ferretblogging: Tilly's Adorable

And she knows it. She just sits around all day looking for opportunities to be gorgeous: 

A. 

JUNE 5 BITCHES

That's when Walker will be evicted, the baby flying spaghetti monster willing. 

Epic First Draft drinking crack-vanning VERY SERIOUS PROFESSIONAL REPORTING is planned. 

A. 

Malaka Of The Week: Fred Heebe

Fred Heebe is a big macher in Louisiana politics and has been an egregious malaka for years. In 2001, then Gov. Mike Foster urged his huntin' buddy Dubya to appoint Heebe US Attorney. Unfortunately for Heebe, allegations of spousal abuse surfaced and his nomination was withdrawn. Heebe, however, has continued to be one of the most influential crony capitalists in Jefferson Parish.

Right now, Heebe is in a world of hurt because of allegations swirling like gnats around a landfill that he owns. Heebe's buddy, former JP President Aaron Broussard, is under indictment for non-garbage related charges but the US Attorney's office is investigating the hell out of his ties to Heebe. Broussard is best known outside the Gret Stet for crying on teevee right after Katrina and locally for having abandoned his toupee after the storm. Not sure if the sucker floated away but whatever happened to it, Aaron has been going au naturel since 2005.

End of exposition. Heebe is back in the news because he's suing an anonymous commenter on NOLA.com who Freddy the malaka claims is an Assistant US Attorney:

Landfill magnate Fred Heebe filed a civil defamation suit Monday against a frequent commenter on NOLA.com, alleging that the commenter -- who uses the handle "Henry L. Mencken1951" -- is actually an assistant U.S. attorney. The suit says that Heebe does not know the commenter's real name "with certainty," but it speculates that the commenter is Assistant U.S. Attorney Sal Perricone.

According to the suit, Heebe enlisted a former FBI profiler to review 595 comments left by "Henry L. Mencken" below stories posted on NOLA.com. 

The comments were compared to legal filings made by federal prosecutors in their sweeping probe of the River Birch landfill, which is co-owned by Heebe and his father-in-law. The profiler found striking similarities in the language, the suit says.

The petition notes that "Mencken" uses obscure words, such as "dubiety" and "redoubt," that also appear in federal filings in the River Birch case.

The suit says the analysis was conducted by forensic linguist James Fitzgerald whose work for the FBI "proved instrumental" in the arrest and successful prosecution of Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber, following a lengthy investigation that included analysis of the mail bomber's writings.

Perricone is one of the lead prosecutors in the River Birch probe. The suit says Perricone was one of the authors of a nine-page filing Fitzgerald compared to "Mencken's" posts, and it notes that Perricone was born in 1951.

Learned comments are *very* rare on NOLA.com, which is home to racist and sexist trolls as opposed to people who say shit like this:

The record on NOLA.com doesn't establish "Mencken's" identity. But it does show him to be a man of many strong opinions.

He disparages a person defending traffic cameras on Henry Clay Avenue as a "typical uptowner," adding: "This is just another example of elitism in New Orleans -- the great sliver of loam -- that some people feel, depending on their ZIP code, that they can impose their ersatz nobility on the rest of the population. ... Henry Clay is a public street, and you are complicit in with the city in setting up a Mississippi-like speed trap in your gilded vicinage. What's next, Rex as the traffic court judge?"

It *almost* makes me want to read the comments at NOLA.com again BUT I'll continue to abstain. Heebe's lawsuit appears to be a gambit to screw up the investigation into his slimy malakatude. It has also opened a can of worms as to the free speech rights of anonymous internet commenters. If the Mencken acolyte is indeed AUSA Perricone, he's in deep shit and sinking fast; especially since the erudite troll bashed US Attorney Jim Letten as a showboat and glory hog. Truth is certainly a defense in that instance: Letten is also <ahem> a drummer. Say no more.

Fred Heebe may be a malaka but he's a smart malaka. He's the target of a federal investigation and is hoping to prove bias and prosecutorial misconduct, which could seriously damage the case against him. It should be interesting to see how this plays out and I'll keep y'all updated.

Btw, I hope I'll get a few plaudits for NOT making the obvious pun on this week's malaka's last name. Been there, done that.

UPDATE: Perricone is indeed the commenter with the Mencken moniker. This plot is thicker than a figgy pudding.

High Finance For Our Time

From Album4

So, according to now-former Goldman executive Greg Smith, pretty much all the stuff behind the curtain is crap. And that's by design.

Wednesday Night Music: Let The Idiot Speak

Stupidity and dumbassery is the theme for the day:

 

Quote of the day

It comes from Jon Hamm:

“Whether it’s Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian or whoever, stupidity is certainly celebrated. Being a fucking idiot is a valuable commodity in this culture because you’re rewarded significantly.”

Lord knows, I watch more than my share of trash teevee but even I have standards albeit low ones. Besides I watch crappy shows to mock them. I really do not understand why stupidity is in vogue but it is. I guess Archbishop Santorum would call me a snob but nobody who publicly admits to watching Hardcore Pawn is a snob. There I said it. I have, however, never watched the Kardashians or Paris Hilton's sex tape and you can quote me on that.

What Churches Risk

In the headlong rush into sexual political fights: 

It's too bad U.S. bishops are spending so much political and cultural capital on the religious liberty fight which is now becoming bogged down over contraception. Too bad because while they are engaged in what I suspect will be a losing battle in a rhetorical war, the voice they are raising, rare these days in Washington, against a real war is getting lost in the cultural haze.

As U.S. Senators have essentially now begun taking orders directly from AIPAC and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—in a manner that would no doubt generate outrage in Israel were such frank interference attempted by the Obama administration—and as media reports continue to "soften" the American public in preparation for an "inevitable" confrontation with Iran, U.S. bishops have finally stepped into the fray raising a hand of warning.

In a March 2 letter from Bishop Richard E. Pates of Des Moines, chair of the U.S.C.C.B. Committee on International Justice and Peace, to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the bishops noted their concern over “an alarming escalation in rhetoric and tensions,” including Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic and speculation on the possible use of force against Iran, including an Israeli pre-emptive strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.

That link goes to the US Catholic magazine's blog, btw, not to some crazy hippie site. Here's another entry:

Did you know, for example, that the bishops are presenting President Obama with a petition to change our country’s policy on nuclear weapons?

The USCCB’s website currently has a petition titled “President Obama, move us closer to a world free of nuclear weapons.” Says the petition: “In the 21st century, nuclear weapons are a global security liability, not an asset. You must act now to reduce the nuclear danger and the role of nuclear weapons.”

Why isn’t this being preached from the pulpit?

Um, because wer'e too busy talking about sexy things like gay sex and birth control and who has the right to have the holy sacrament of humping where and for how many cookies? I can't fault, entirely, the bishops for the relentless focus our national media has on boning, but I can fault them for not realizing that the minute they open their celibate traps about sex that's all anybody's going to talk about. After all, it's only been like 40 years of this now.

I know Holy Mother Church thinks in millennia, and I know being media-savvy isn't exactly their strong suit, but you'd really think they would have figured this out by now. That they're acting like they haven't means they're either criminally dim or deliberately so, and either way it's bad news for anybody who'd like anything done that doesn't involve policing where people put their penises. 

When it comes right down to it the Church has made a deliberate choice that sexual intercourse is going to be the hill they want to die on. And absent some massive backlash on the part of the faithful, dying is exactly what they're going to do. 

A. 

Game Change Or, Now I Want To Claw My Eyeballs Out

We had a hockey game Saturday night and so we DVR'd "Game Change" and I'm just now watching it.

Lots has been written about it, mostly of the "I never thought I'd feel sorry for Sarah Palin" variety. I don't feel sorry for her. I'm appalled, outraged and pissed off all over again! What the hell? The absolute last emotion I feel for anyone involved in this debacle is sympathy. Holy shit, this woman didn't know the basics of contemporary history, let alone the nuances of American foreign policy.

What really gets me is not that the McCain campaign foisted someome so unfamiliar with basic current affairs onto the national stage, but that she was made governor of the state of Alaska in the first place. How the hell did that even happen? I can see the McCain campaign deciding, "well, she's governor of Alaska, so surely she's educated, right? She can add two plus two, right?" They completely underestimated the vast dumbing-down of America that has occurred over the past 30 years.

And therein lies our problem. I look at the idiots in Tennessee's state government and I see crackpots like Rep. Rick Womick, last seen peddling John Birch Society black helicopter conspiracy theories in our state legislature. Somehow these clueless, uninformed blockheads become mayors and then state representatives and state senators and then governors, and before you know it, some desperate fuck decides to put them on a national ticket because it needs some sex appeal. And God help us if next time they get elected. That scares the crap out of me.

I realize this isn't any earth-shattering revelation, but I feel like until we start expecting better from ourselves we're not going to get anything better from our political leadership. This fish is rotting from the tail up.

Cheesy Grits?

First, a fond adieu to Virgotex and a rousing greeting to Southern Beale. Btw, the latter is a <drum roll> hockey fan and roots for some team called the Predators one of whose stars is a guy named Pekka. I am making none of this up. Since mocking hockey is one of my jobs here at First Draft, I thought I'd get an early start.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Mitt Haircut's culinary pandering.

 

I used to faux admire Mitt for his ability to pander but he's either lost his touch or his android memory drive is on the blink. I'm a mere transplanted Southerner and live in a city where grits are no big whoop but even I know that it's CHEESE GRITS. Cheesy is, however, a word that describes Romney's stump style.

Next thing you know, Willard will be quoting Robert Johnson and urging voters to:

 

Fuck Yeah Himal Chuli!

I dream about this place when I've been away from Madison for too long. 

A. 

Dispatch From Tennessee

Greetings, First Drafters! First of all, a big thanks to Athenae and everyone else for the warm welcome and the opportunity to share my rantings over here. I look forward to meeting some new friends. Also, please bear with me: I'm a TypePad newbie.

Let me start out by introducing myself. I grew up in Montclair, N.J. and Los Angeles, CA -- two of the country's most liberal cities. But I've spent most of my adult life in Nashville, TN, rural Kentucky and rural Pennsylvania -- among our most conservative areas. (Let me debunk some regional stereotypes right now: I met more rednecks whose family trees had no branches in Pennsylvania than I ever did in Kentucky. Just sayin', y'all.)

I have an undergraduate degree in environmental science. My professional career has been divided between the music industry and communications in environmental ed and resource management. I devoted years to a progressive church, where I coordinated outreach activities like monthly congregational letter-writing campaigns -- but I'm so sick of Christians ramming their religion down my throat all the time that I haven't walked through a church door in three years.

So, I'm a riddle wrapped in a contradiction tied with a flip-floppy bow. Most of my posts over at Southern Beale are written in a fog of outrage over some pile of stupid that's been inflicted on the world, and I do take this shit personally, so expect some cuss words. I think, as a longtime reader and commenter over here, that this won't upset too many people.

I like living in Tennessee but a lot of stuff pisses me off here, and honestly there are days when it's all I can do to keep from packing up the dogs and cats and telling the husband to meet me in California. The last few years have been particularly horrid. We've got every wretched piece of wingnutty legislation coming out of Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma, with a special Tennessee twist: crap like our "Don't Say Gay" bill, or how our Republican-dominated state legislature decided to override Nashville's non-discrimination ordinance last year, because small government! And local control! Except when we don't like it!

Democrats in Tennessee are an anemic, demoralized bunch but they do exist, and occasionally they come up with a good idea or two. One was a bill that would force legislators to disclose the special interest groups behind "model legislation" of the kind coming from ALEC and the National Conference of State Legislatures. Sadly, last week the Influence Disclosure Act was killed in a subcommittee, but not before Republicans kicked it in the teeth:

“This is a bad bill ... horrible bill, really,” Rep. Curry Todd, R-Collierville, said during the House State and Local Government Subcommittee meeting. “I know what it’s getting back at. It’s getting back at ALEC.”

Curry Todd ... Curry Todd ... why does that name sound familiar? Oh yeah: he's the Tennessee state chair of ALEC, as well as an ALEC board member. How convenient! ALEC sure got their money's worth! 

But there's something else, something nagging at the back of my head ... oh yeah: back in the fall Todd, who sponsored our notorious "guns-in-bars" bill, was arrested for DUI with his loaded .38 special wedged between his seat and the car's center console. Click on the link, the mug shot alone is priceless. Todd was so shitfaced he literally could not walk straight, let alone drive, let alone be trusted with a loaded handgun.

If this were a Demcorat there would be manufactured outrage all day and all night until the poor sucker was run out of the legislature and sent home with his tail tucked between his legs. But Curry Todd is a useful idiot for the corporatocracy, able to quash things like the Influence DIsclosure Act that would let everyone know which bills were written by the Koch Bros. or Corrections Corp. of America. So we've all kind of forgotten about the mess at the corner of 21st Avenue South and Blair, and anyway, didn't a prominent Democrat do something awful once, too? Move along ... move along. 

Because that's how we do it here in Tennessee.

Pitchers and Catchers Reporting to Blog Camp

All right, you circus animals, we's shaking stuff up around here.

With regret, we bid adieu to Virgo on Wednesdays. She's done a great job and I'm sorry to see her leave, but she kept chewing through the leather straps and digging under the electric fence. That shit isn't cheap and we need every dollar to feed Tilly. 

In all sincerity, thanks for your work here lady, and don't be a stranger.

And we have a new guest poster on Tuesdays: Southern Beale! Everybody show her where Tommy's Haz-Mat suits are and try to keep the ferrets from stealing her shoes -- for the first week or so at least. As I tell people who've been to my house more than once, "You're family now, so get your own damn beer." 

A. 

Pensions Are Good For You

Good for business, good for the economy, even good for the 1 percent: 

Bovie illustrates pensions’ impact with the example of a retired firefighter. He directly impacts his local economy when he uses his pension income to buy a lawnmower. The indirect impact of his purchase is an increase in income not just for the store where he purchased the lawnmower, but for every company involved in its production and distribution. When those companies benefit from increased income, they can hire new employees who spend their paychecks in their local economies, the induced impact of the firefighter’s purchase.

While a single firefighter buying a lawnmower is unlikely to have such a dramatic impact on the national economy, the combined force of the 10,000 baby boomers who will turn 65 every day for the next 19 years (according to the Pew Research Center) and begin retiring and using their pensions, make that pension ripple effect look more like a wave.

In addition to the impact on output, expenditures made from pension-benefit payments supported 6.5 million Americans and paid nearly $315 billion in labor income. Retirees’ expenditures of pension benefit payments contributed $553 billion to GDP and $134 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue.

It's amazing. It's almost like everything we're hearing from Republican lawmakers about how America can't afford to pay pensions is ... total bullshit. It's almost like even if all those fatcat union workers are spending their money on T-bone steaks, that still benefits ... the cattle industry. Astonishing. 

The lone comment on this eminently sensible argument is my favorite conservadouche thing ever: 

This is true only if defined benefit pensions are pre-funded. If they are not -- and they are not -- the result is a net loss. They rob younger generations. Underfunded private pensions ameliorate that by reducing payments to pensioners, who share the risks. Government pensions do not, so they result in reduced services, higher taxes and threats to bondholders. 

WELL THEN WHY DON'T WE FULLY FUND THE FUCKING THINGS? I'm sorry for yelling, but there actually is a solution to this, Mr. Almighty Taxpayer. It's to start treating promises we make to those who work for us like we treat promises made to defense contractors and fucking pay them what we owe them. It's to start acting like this shit is actually important, and be grown-ups, and stop braying about taxes and what we can and can't afford while whole pallets of cash go missing overseas and nobody even ASKS where that money goes. I swear to God I can't have a sincere conversation about this while we're still dumping money down basically a wishing well in Afghanistan because somehow we only ever seem to get fiscally responsible when it's time to fuck over somebody who works for a living. 

Schmuck.

x-posted at Firedoglake

A. 

Post-Racial Society and the Journalism of the Worst

Well, I'm sure glad we're past all possible racism in the world: 

Fans of Alamo Heights, a wealthy San Antonio school district, chanted "USA!" during the regional basketball championship trophy presentation in the school's Littleton Gym on Saturday, according to video posted by KENS5. The predominantly white Alamo Heights team had defeated San Antonio's Thomas A. Edison High School, a mostly Latino team, by 50-39 Friday night, earning its first spot in the state tournament since 1991, the station reported.

And can I just ask, what the fuck is going on where we quote random shit off Facebook now? 

Some posting on the KSAT-TV Facebook page called the Alamo Heights chants patriotic.

"I am totally with the USA Cheers," wrote John Nicks. "They should not be forced to or apologize at all. Its Hispanic team vs Caucasian Team, whats wrong with rooting and cheering for the USA/Caucasians to win?"

GREAT. That's just ... first of all, to this fuckstick, yes, in the history of the world in no way has chanting in favor of white people ever gone bad. Never even once. And to the LA Times, pulling stuff of the local TV's Facebook page is not, shall we say, the same as actually interviewing members of the community. Trust me when I say you can reliably find bigots in real life as well as on the Internet if what you needed was somebody to represent the "I spectacularly do not get it" demographic. Just because I love the Internet and think it can be used for all kinds of journalistic endeavors does not mean I approve of it being substituted for basic reporting. 

Once upon a time we did things like going to the school's neighborhood and talking to folks. You know, journalism. I suppose that was before the Internet ruined everything by forcing us to be lazy and stupid. Once Facebook happened, it was like we lost control of our limbs and our car keys disappeared and we could no longer go and find stuff out, and so Facebook and Twitter became the new "sources." 

DAMN YOU INTERNET. 

A. 

Today on Tommy T's Obsession with the Freeperati - Bloody Bull edition

Well, I was going to take the weekend off anyway -

Sliced my right index finger open sliding it down a carboard box flap to open it.

Back next week with some more Putrid Potpourri.

Meanwhile, here's Bailey Bulldog, ready for action as usual...

As TBogg says - click him to big him.

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Game of Fuck Yeah: April First, Bitches

It's back: 

A. 

Living for Bread Ain't Worth Living At All

RMJ on a Lent I could get into: 

You have heard; you have seen; perhaps today you even bear the ashes on your head; perhaps you didn't, or you wiped them off at the church door. It doesn't matter! What matters is what you do, and if you remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return, then you'll realize that we are all dust! And we are all deserving, we are all going down, in the end, to the same place, and it's high time we started sharing the joy of the experience rather than fearing we won't have enough accumulated for ourselves at the end! Where is your treasure? Where rust corrodes and thief steals and moth devours? Get rid of it! Your treasure is in the homeless person you can help, in the hungry person you can feed, in the naked person you can clothe! Your treasure is all around you; now put your heart there, and open the eyes of your spirit, and see it!

We've been lucky in a mild winter this year. We've been lucky in a winter that feel shorter than in years past, that feels more like an endless November than our usual endless frozen January. I have a window open today, and yesterday it was still fully light at 5, and usually I'm thinking around this time that the winter will never end and we might not survive it. This year I'm thinking maybe it's almost over, and we will. 

I said to my mother the other day, when we were talking about a project I'm working on involving the ugliness of the church, that the reason I call myself a practicing Catholic is that I"m not very good at it. It's glib but it's true, and my most frequent prayer is, "I'm trying here, Dude, cut me some slack already." It's easy to confuse ritual and repetition with the point, and I'm good at the point but not at the ritual. Some instinctive resistance to authority, maybe, or just the subsconscious desire to fuck something up so that I have something to beat myself up about? As it is, I'm not making it to church all that often, and when I am, I'm distracted. 

None of this is helped, of course, by the sad spectacle of the church attempting to smash itself on the rocks of contemporary American sexual politics, evidenced most profoundly by shit like this: 

At her mother's funeral mass at the St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Gaithersburg, Md., a grieving Barbara Johnson was the first in line to receive communion.

What happened next stunned her. The priest refused Johnson, who is gay, the sacramental bread and wine.

"He covered the bowl with the Eucharist with his hand and looked at me, and said I cannot give you communion because you live with a woman and that is a sin in the eyes of the church," Johnson told ABC News affiliate WJLA.

And this is so clearly the opposite of the point that it makes my vision go white with anger: That altar, that table, is a place of profound and radical equality. We come to that place tarnished and damaged, all of us, and all of us the same, and if there is a test in that place it's the test of those giving and not those receiving communion. We are all the Stranger in someone's eyes, all the Other. We are all the undeserving. Throw the first stone, bitches, I dare you, because we will all, someday, approach a door behind which could be welcome or condemnation and our only forlon fucking hope is that we meet with treatment we do not deserve. 

The stories in the Bible, at least the ones that speak to me most clearly, are not about daring to go inside. They're about daring to let others in, to accept the person feared, to say yes instead of no when asked a question, to help instead of walking past. That's the message that has even the barest chance of connecting with people in the world today, not this endless bludgeoning of the insufficiently devout in matters of sexual behavior and political thought. Not this cycle of punishment and purging. I hear people talk about a smaller, stronger, purer church and I think how completely opposite that is to the aim of everything I've ever been taught by the church itself.

We're supposed to try to be more, not to force others to be less. 

A. 

Sunday Morning Video: Centerfield

Spring training is in full flow and opening day isn't far away so it's time for the classic Fogerty video: